SOURCE: Cohen, Michael. “The Reader as Whoremonger: A Phenomenological Approach to Rossetti's ‘Jenny’.” Victorian Newsletter no. 70 (fall 1986): 5-7.

The rhetorical strategy in Rossetti's “Jenny” forces the reader past sympathy with the poem's narrator to identification with him. This is an uneasy and unstable identification which alternates with a distancing of reader from speaker and with the reader's criticism and unfavorable judgment of the speaker. Nevertheless the poem's readers—including female readers—are made to share the guilt of Jenny's sexual exploitation. The reader is engaged and brought into the poem through a number of strategies of which the surface train of thought of the narrator is only the most obvious. The prudent and prudish omission of the overtly salacious and of anything which actually names Jenny's occupation—“what thing she is”—constitutes another strategy. But the most powerful strategy works through a combination of religious and art imagery in the tranformation of Jenny from Magdalene to Virgin.

Our initial impression of the narrator, who has forsaken his books for the company of a prostitute, marks him as not much of a scholar and still less a gentleman. But he perceives that something is to be learned from Jenny and comments to the sleeping girl:

You know not what a book you seem
Half-read by lightning in a dream!

(51-52)

The narrator wonders what Jenny is thinking as she sleeps. He imagines that she is thankful for a rest from “envy's voice at virtue's pitch,” “the pale girl's dumb rebuke,” and the “wise unchildish elf” who points her out, “what thing she is,” to his schoolmate. But what she most needs rest from, he thinks, is “the hatefulness of man, Who spares not to end what he began.” This is the first point at which the narrator's moral musings are directed inward toward himself as guilty and responsible for Jenny's fate.

The narrator imagines an idyllic rural past for Jenny, when she would dream about the city she knows so well now. He imagines her future too:

When, wealth and health slipped past, you stare
Along the streets alone, and there,
Round the long park, across the bridge,
The cold lamps at the pavement's edge
Wind on together and apart,
A fiery serpent for your heart.

(149-154)

The speaker's condescending recognition that Jenny sleeps just as any other woman sleeps (177) leads him to think of his cousin Nell (185-202) and to imagine a future in which Nell's children might be in Jenny's situation and need her children's charity (210-214). In the next hundred lines, in the middle of the poem, Rossetti, having brought narrator and reader to a wider social and historical view of Jenny's “case,” now effects a moral reversal, shifting the burden of shame from Jenny to the speaker and the implied observer. But he effects this change not merely through the speaker's surface thoughts: from the beginning of the poem a series of images has worked to rehabilitate Jenny in the mind's eye, purifying and even sanctifying the picture which the reader creates of her.¹

When Rossetti rhymes the girl's name with guinea in the first couplet of the poem, he suggests that it is the pet form for Virginia rather than for Jennifer or Jane or Genevieve.² But his purpose is not irony; the name connects with other images which suggest the virgin in Jenny. Jenny is Magdalene not only by profession but iconographically by the emphasis on her long hair (10-11, 47, 174, 340), a traditional sign for this New Testament figure.³ But she is transformed from Mary Magdalene to Mary Virgin by an early line in the poem which echoes the annunciation:

Poor shameful Jenny, full of grace

(18)

It is a reversal of the annunciation in some ways, spoken by a definitely unangelic speaker (though a Gabriel speaks through him) to an unaware, sleeping Jenny rather than a waking, watchful Mary, recording an all-too human rather than divine past and future and a soul state wrought by male sin rather than female purity.⁴ The biblical echoes that concern virgins do not end until the end of the poem, when the dawn finds Jenny's lamp still alight, “Like a wise virgin's” (316), and the narrator and reader decamp, leaving Jenny indeed virginal for this encounter at least.

Between these references to virgins, other biblical echoes are scattered through the poem. Jenny's “lazy lily hand” (97) leads to the lilies of the field (100-110) and fled roses to “the naked stem of thorns” (120) which links passion and suffering, loosely connecting Jenny's case with Christ's, sinful with expiatory passion.

The religious references join in the poem's center with art imagery showing Jenny as art object or model and emphasizing the role of the maker. The speaker first seems to suggest that blame is assignable to God for Jenny's case:

                                        —what to say
Or think,—this awful secret sway,
The potter's power over the clay!
Of the same lump (it has been said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.

(180-184)

The thought shakes him; he says it “makes a goblin of the sun” (206). But when he speaks of the painter placing “Some living woman's simple face”—perhaps Jenny's—in a “gilded aureole,” he says that such pictures have the power to show men what God can do in forming nature, but that Jenny's fate has been wrought by man:

What has man done here? How atone,
Great God, for this which man has done?

(241-42)

Jenny's face comes to be seen, as it might be by Raphael or Leonardo, as fit for a picture “For preachings of what God can do” (240). God has modeled the “real” Jenny; man has made her “case”—is the artist of her sin and prostitution. Lust is man's creation, and the narrator sees it when he looks at Jenny with his mind's eye:

          Yet, Jenny, looking long at you,
The woman almost fades from view.
A cipher of man's changeless sum
Of lust, past, present, and to come,
Is left. A riddle that one shrinks
To challenge from the scornful sphinx.

(276-281)

It is an inward look that gives him that view; Jenny's “stilled features” are the same long throat and “pure wide curve from ear to chin” that might inspire Raphael. Jenny's face is a work of divine art, but her “case” is a human creation which narrator and reader find first a book, then a picture, and finally a mirror.

So much for the poem's male readers. A serious argument could be made, however, that “Jenny” isn't a poem aimed at male readers at all. For one thing, in this poem with its salacious subject there is a complete absence of salacious detail from the beginning—even from the epigraph. The Merry Wives of Windsor scene to which Rossetti alludes in the epigraph contains some fairly explicit bawdry: double entendres and sexual metaphors abound as the Welsh schoolmaster asks his pupil for the “focative” case, and then for the genitive case of hic, which is horum. Mistress Quickly interrupts: “Vengeance of Jenny's case! Fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore” (IV, i, 53-54). Rossetti quotes only “Vengeance of Jenny's case! Fie on her! Never name her, child.” In fact Jenny's case is never explicitly named—“what thing she is.” Nor is the milder word prostitute used. Aside from a line early in the poem mentioning “Love's exuberant hotbed” (13) there is no language in the poem that overtly images passion. The subject may be racy; the language is not.

Partly what identifies Jenny as whore are the references to money throughout the poem, and these tell us more about the speaker than about Jenny:

Lazy laughing languid Jenny,
Fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea

(1-2)

Whose person or whose purse may be
The lodestar of your reverie?

(20-21)

The speaker pretends to know Jenny's dreams (364), but these are his own imaginings. In fact, money in the poem is connected to a cluster of images of gold coins (2, 226), golden hair (10-11), golden skin (50), golden sun (224), the “gilded aureole” of a saint (230), and gold coins again, this time a shower of them in Jenny's hair in a self-flattering allusion identifying the speaker with Zeus and Jenny with Danae (374-77). At several points in the poem this golden image cluster becomes a vehicle for the transference of “guilt”—there is the possibility of a pun but the speaker talks more about shame than guilt, though much about gilt. One point, already mentioned, is that at which Jenny's face is seen as suitable model for a saintly image, with a gilded aureole. At another point just before, gold turns into the more precious commodity of time:

          How Jenny's clock ticks on the shelf!
Might not the dial scorn itself
That has such hours to register?
Yet as to me, even so to her
Are golden sun and silver moon,
In daily largesse of earth's boon,
Counted for life-coins to one tune.
And if, as blindfold fates are toss'd,
Through some one man this life be lost,
Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?

(220-29)

In the passages from line 207 to line 249 the speaker asks several important questions which indicate a transference of guilt from the poem's subject to its narrator and readers. The first question asks whether in the future Jenny's and Nell's cases might not be reversed in their offspring (211-213). The second asks whether soul shall “not somehow pay for soul” (229), and the third asks:

                              How atone,
Great God, for this which man has done?

(241-42)

Immediately after these questions the narrator exclaims:

          If but a woman's heart might see
Such erring heart unerringly
For once!

(250-52)

The narrator concludes that this can never be and that no chaste woman can view Jenny's case with propriety. He says this in a passage which unites the flower images which have characterized Jenny (a fresh flower, lillies, roses) with the book image of learning and recognition, used since the poem's beginning, and with the book as an image of enclosure. The enclosure images of the poem such as the narrator's “captive hours of youth” (25) when he was captive in a different sort of book, the rose shut in a book, and the toad within the stone (282ff.), all point to the fact that the poem's subject is actually an enclosed drama—a psychomachia which begins as the narrator's but ends as the reader's also:

          Like a rose shut in a book
In which pure women may not look,
For its base pages claim control
To crush the flower within the soul;
Where through each dead rose-leaf that clings,
Pale as transparent psyche-wings,
To the vile text, are traced such things
As might make lady's cheek indeed
More than a living rose to read;
So nought save foolish foulness may
Watch with hard eyes the sure decay;
And so the life-blood of this rose,
Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows
Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose:
Yet still it keeps such faded show
Of when 'twas gathered long ago,
That the crushed petals' lovely grain,
The sweetness of the sanguine stain,
Seen of a woman's eyes, must make
Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache,
Love roses better for its sake:—
Only that this can never be:—
Even so unto her sex is she.

(253-75)

The gentleman, protesting too much, says “this can never be” so often we are likely to forget what can never be: a chaste woman's confrontation with Jenny herself, rather than with this chastened image of her in the poem. For in this guise pure women may indeed read the text of Jenny's case, see that she is as other women, see her erring heart unerringly, and more. I am suggesting that the reader's reaction is more than sympathy, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling; it is assumption of guilt for Jenny's case. For the female reader this can only come, not in the recognition that she could easily have been in Jenny's place, but in the recognition of who benefits from the exchanges of prostitution, in gold coins or whatever other “offerings nicely plac'd” which “But hide Priapus to the waist” (368-69). Cousin Nell, reading the poem with an open mind and that “pitiful heart, so prone to ache,” will not escape the realization that prostitution is the necessary underground basis for the exaltation of such “pure women” and the reverence in which she is held. The male reader, the female reader, and the narrator—we have all enjoyed Jenny's favors and share the guilt of her sexual exploitation. That Rossetti manages this identification with the narrator even though we begin and end our visit with him thinking he is pompous, priggish, and self-absorbed, is a measure of the poem's complexity. That complexity may be what led Graham Hough to declare Rossetti's dramatic monologues “as good as anything of Browning's of the same kind, with perhaps the evidence of a less commonplace mind behind them” (69).

Notes

1. G. I. Hersey recognizes that Rossetti is in fact painting a picture of Jenny as the narrator's thoughts proceed: “‘Jenny’ employs a form of ecphrasis … the poetic or rhetorical description of real or imagined works of visual art, usually paintings or sculptures” (17).

2. The word guinea (in addition to its use as a derogatory term for an Italian—which the lines can accommodate) now refers merely to the amount of twenty-one shillings, but until the last coinage of 1813 went out of circulation it was the name of the gold coin (supposedly minted from gold from the Guinea Coast of Africa) of that amount. Gold coins and other golden or gilt objects figure importantly in the poem's imagery. Jenny cannot be considered as any generic (puns seem unavoidable) name for a prostitute, although there is one precedent in Pope's “Sober Advice from Horace,” mostly dealing with whores and whoremongers, which has two lines describing a Jenny who, like Rossetti's, has her bodice open to the waist:

             … bashful Jenny, even at Morning-Prayer,
   Spreads her Fore-Buttocks to the Navel bare.

   (33-34)

   Pope's source is the Horatian satire, I, ii, concerning adultery.

3. Anne Hollander points out that “Thick and abundant female hair safely conveyed a vivid sexual message in an atmosphere of extreme prudery” and that the long hair of the Magdalene “constituted a scriptural reference and was thus an identifying attribute” (73). Tradition confuses the Mary Magdalene mentioned in all four evangelists with the woman who washes Christ's feet with tears and dries them with her hair (Luke 7:36-38); hence the significance of her hair.

4. The reverse themes of fallen woman/annunciation in Rossetti are commented on by Linda Nochlin (152), Martin Meisel (331-32), David Sonstroem (3-4).

Works Cited

Hersey, G. I. “Rossetti's ‘Jenny’: A Realist Altarpiece.” Yale Review 69 (1979): 17-32.

Hollander, Anne. Seeing Through Clothes. New York: Viking, 1978.

Hough, Graham. The Last Romantics. London: Methuen, 1947.

Meisel, Martin. “‘Half Sick of Shadows’: The Aesthetic Dialogue in Pre-Raphaelite Painting.” Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P, 1977.

Nochlin, Linda. “Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman.” The Art Bulletin. 58 (1978): 139-53.

Sonstroem, David. Rossetti and the Fair Lady. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1970.